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This should slay quite a few "pseudo-bugs" in Debian. http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_001#outcome The decision means that a Debian package can contain documentation licenced under the previously questionable GNU Free Documentation Licence (e.g. http://qof.sourceforge.net/) as long as the option within that licence to make certain sections unmodifiable (or invariant) is *not* used. The option exists to protect ideological elements in a published work (see http://www.codehelp.co.uk) that merely reflect the opinion or purpose of the original author. It means that documentation that uses the invariant sections would go into non-free unless relicensed and republished by the author(s) without those sections. Compare these two statements: This one is (now) free in terms of Debian: The copyright licensing notice below applies to this text. Copyright © 2004 Linas Vepstas Copyright © 2005-2006 Neil Williams Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of this license is included in the file copying.txt This one is not: The copyright licensing notice below applies to this text. Copyright © 1998-2004 Neil Williams Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant Sections being "Principles behind www.codehelp.co.uk", "Peer review of software" and "ePatents" only, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of this license is included in the file copying.txt In each case, copying.txt is the same file, the GNU FDL licence. The invariant sections in the latter are: http://www.codehelp.co.uk/html/about.html#principles http://www.codehelp.co.uk/html/about.html#peerreview http://www.codehelp.co.uk/html/about.html#patents as identified by the licence. Each section only contains my personal opinion of the topic at hand and I've used the invariant section because allowing others to change those sections would be to misrepresent my opinion - that isn't a case of restricting freedom, it's about protecting the individual. It's no good allowing someone to change the section on patents to negate the arguments against software patents. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.data-freedom.org/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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